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EDUCATION FOR ADULTS 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 





EDUCATION FOR ADULTS 


AND OTHER ESSAYS -<c 7) 
LQ 


BY 
FREDERICK PAUL KEPPEL 








New York 
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS 
1926 


Copyright 1926 
By CotumBia UNIVERSITY PREss 


Printed from type. Published December 1926 
Second printing February 1927 


THE PLIMPTON PRESS: NORWOOD : MASS. 
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 


CONTENTS 


BOUCATIONTRORVADULTSIC Uae ene Paws 9 
ApuLt EpucaTion, Topay AND ToMoRROW .. 395 
PLAYBOYS OF THE COLLEGE WorLD...:.... 595 


OPPORTUNITIES AND DANGERS OF EDUCATIONAL 
TRCHURLATIONS Sethe i ee toe Lares See ding 


Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2022 with funding from 
Princeton Theological Seminary Library 


https://archive.org/details/educationforaduloOkepp 


EDUCATION FOR ADULTS 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 





EDUCATION FOR ADULTS 
AND OTHER ESSAYS 


EDUCATION FOR ADULTS* 


THE front line troops in our American army of 
students make an impressive showing. Stretching 
from the nursery to the doctorate, they total, in 
kindergarten, in the grades, in high school and 
academy, in college and technical school, in the 
university, something over twenty-five million 
souls. On the whole, the different branches of the 
service are pretty well balanced, and if there is not 
universal satisfaction as to the leadership on the 
one hand and the spirit and performance of the 
troops on the other, there is no prevailing weight 
of opinion as to what changes should be made, and 
the different types of criticism tend to neutralize 
one another. The American community is deeply 
interested in this army. It recognizes its funda- 
mental importance in the life of the nation, and, 
in general, it understands and approves what is 
going on. 


1 An article first published in the Yale Review, April, 1926, 
and reprinted by courtesy of that publication. 


9 


EDUCATION FOR ADULTS AND OTHER E’ssAys 


So much for the professional educational soldier, 
the one for whom education is, for the moment, 
presumed to be the main business of life. How 
about our militia? How about those for whom 
educational soldiering, if indulged in at all, must 
be performed in spare time, for whom learning 
must be, from the nature of the case, a supple- 
mentary activity? When we examine these militia 
forces, we find a very different situation. We find, 
first, an almost complete neglect of them and their 
leaders by our educational general staff. We find 
a serious lack of balance among the different 
branches of the service, primarily because recruit- 
ing has been encouraged only among those who 
will pay their expenses — and perhaps turn in a 
profit. We find no general appreciation of their 
present number nor of the excellent material in- 
cluded among them; no national realization of 
their growing importance in view of changing 
social and economic conditions, nor of their normal 
place in a well-rounded national life. 

This, at any rate, is the impression which the 
present status in the United States of what we 
loosely call “adult education”? makes upon one 
who has recently had occasion and opportunity to 
study the movement rather closely. I wish we 
had some better term than “ adult education ” to 

10 


EDUCATION FoR ADULTS 


describe it. It is the process of learning, on the 
initiative of the individual, seriously and consecu- 
tively undertaken as a supplement to some prim- 
ary occupation. Of course, there is no hard and 
fast line. Many of the names which are printed 
to pad the totals of our graduate schools belong 
to wage-earners who are giving less time, on the 
whole, to their education than are the men and 
women in a typical workers’ education class. The 
process obviously may be begun long before the 
individual can be termed an adult — among the 
most important questions before us is how to get 
some effective hold between the ages of sixteen and 
twenty upon the boys and girls who have drifted 
away from school. It can be taken up whenever 
what we call the individual’s schooling comes to 
an end, or at any age thereafter. The start may be 
made from any rung of our long ladder of formal 
education. Indeed, one of the first things we must 
do is to get rid of the idea that adult education is 
necessarily for the benighted. The clinical classes 
offered to practising physicians by such institu- 
tions as the New York Academy of Medicine, for 
example, or the classes for engineering executives 
conducted by Purdue and other state institutions, 
should be recognized as falling within any ade- 
quate definition of adult education. 
11 


EpucaTIoN FoR ADULTS AND OrHeER Essays 


'/ Adult education is no new thing in this country, 
‘though we used not to call it by that name. Our 
grandparents supported the lyceums, and they did 
their reading seriously. Our mothers, particularly 
in the smaller communities, were grouped in co- 
teries for mutual intellectual improvement. Its 
development, as we now understand it, however, ; 
has been very recent and, since the war, very rapid. 
To-day, there are at least five times as many 
adults, men and women, pursuing some form of 
educational study as are registered as candidates 
for degrees in all the colleges and universities in 
the country. Of course the amount of time which 
these people can give to their studies is, on the 
average, far less than that which college under- 
graduates can devote, but nevertheless the com- 
parison is a striking one. 

First in number are the students of the commer- 
cial correspondence schools, of which there are 
about three hundred and fifty in the United States. 
At least a million and a half new students are regis- 
tered by these schools every year. A composite 
photograph, based on a study made last year, pic- 
tures the typical correspondence-school student 
as a young man, twenty-six years old, who has had 
two years of high school, and has been out of 
school for ten years. His home is in a medium- 

12 


EDUCATION FOR ADULTS 


sized town of less than one hundred thousand in- 
habitants, probably situated in a State having a 
superior educational spirit, Iowa, for example. He 
is engaged in business or some industrial pursuit, 
on the semi-skilled plane, and has gone far enough 
to appreciate the fact that the unskilled worker in 
all lines is handicapped. 

The next group, in total membership nearly 
a million, includes those in the public evening 
schools, the part-time and continuation schools. 
In the evening schools, the lineaments of the com- 
posite figure are not preponderantly male as in 
the case of the students in the commercial corre- 
spondence courses. The typical age is nineteen 
years and six months. Ninety-two per cent of the 
students are under twenty-four, and seventy-eight 
per cent are under twenty. On the basis of their 
own statements, only fifteen per cent left day 
school because of financial pressure. Most of 
them evidently left because they had lost interest. 
Their reason for returning is the realization that 
education pays. The extent of these efforts of 
the public education authorities varies greatly 
from town to town. For example, cities like 
Milwaukee and Portland, Oregon, can count six 
per cent of their population in the night high 
schools, whereas the national average is not more 

13 


EpuUCATION FoR ADULTS AND OTHER ESSAYS 


than one and a half per cent. There is also great 
variation in the numbers of this group in the dif- 
ferent States, the South, in general, lagging behind 
the rest of the country. i 

About one hundred and fifty thousand students 
are found in university extension classes, including 
correspondence courses. Here the composite por- 
trait is feminine; it shows a teacher approximately 
thirty years of age, studying either English, Ro- 
mance languages, Education, Mathematics, or 
History. California and North Carolina are lead- 
ers in this type of adult education. 

Y. M. C. A. courses number another hundred 
thousand, with perhaps as many under the direc- 
tion of other non-academic organizations. Work- 
ers’ education classes attract thirty thousand. 

Turning to less formal opportunities for adults, 
we find that the various offerings of state and 
federal agencies in agriculture reach hundreds of 
thousands throughout the country. In another 
field, the annual attendance at both the Metro- 
politan Museum of Art of New York and the 
Chicago Art Institute, including the concerts, ran, 
last year, over one hundred thousand, and the 
aggregate total attendance at other museums of 
art and natural history probably exceeded this 
figure. These totals are likely to grow rapidly, for 

14 


EDUCATION FOR ADULTS 


within the past two years more than fifteen mil- 
lion dollars has been spent in the United States 
in the construction of museums. To these we 
must add the attendants of the Chautauquas and 
the lyeéums, and the men and women who are fol- 
lowing a serious course of study with the help of 
the local library. We must reckon also with the 
inaudible spectators of visual education, and the 
invisible auditors who take their nourishment by 
radio. How far the newspapers and magazines 
contribute to what may fairly be called adult edu- 
cation depends on the readers themselves. Prob- 
ably more people than we realize are acquiring 
through them the art of being well-informed. All 
in all, it is certainly safe to say that education for 
adults has now become one of our major industries. 

Our trouble isn’t that we have no adult educa- 
tion. Few realize how much of it we have, and 
how vital and vigorous much of it is. 

At the outset of the article I said that our edu- 
cational militia has been neglected by our general 
staff, and that there is a serious lack of balance 
among its different branches. What in plain Eng- 
lish did I mean? I meant, first, that this whole 
vast movement has grown up outside our best 
educational traditions and leadership, and so with- 
out the guidance and control by which it might 

15 


EpuCcATION FOR ADULTS AND OTHER Essays 


have profited. There are exceptions here and 
there, but, in general, this is the situation as it 
exists to-day. Let me give asingle example. The 
Association of American Universities was founded 
in 1900 and has had annual conferences since that 
year. Only once have its deliberations touched the 
field of adult education, when, in 1910, a paper on 
university extension was presented; and on that 
occasion the delegates in their discussion showed 
much more interest in details of academic book- 
keeping as to credits than in the possibility of 
service to the community. 

Perhaps the reason for this neglect has been that 
our American colleges and universities, naturally 
enough, developed upon the English model, and 
they have tended to retain certain habits and atti- 
tudes which, regardless of how appropriate they 
may have been for the time and place of their 
origin, bear no relation to the present situation in 
the United States, or in England for that matter. 
Perhaps the most marked of these is the assump- 
tion that between Town and Gown a great gulf has 
been fixed by Providence. In our educational de- 
velopment there have been a few honorable excep- 
tions, notably the University of Chicago from its 
foundation in 1892 and, somewhat later, the Uni- 
versity of Wisconsin. Other institutions were, 

16 


EDUCATION FOR ADULTS 


however, more than cautious in following these 
examples. Perhaps because of the general shaking 
up of the academic community which the war 
brought about, there has been since then much 
more general evidence of a wider sense of responsi- 
bility on the part of the universities and colleges. 
Even to-day, however, the extra-mural work is 
largely confined to those very kinds of activity 
which themselves have been only rather recently 
admitted to full membership in the academic 
family — namely, training of teachers, technology, 
agriculture, and commerce. The present interest- - 
ing and promising schemes for co-operative courses 
in which the student divides his time evenly be- 
tween class-room and shop or counting-house are 
practically limited to technology and commerce. 
When we turn to those broad fields of non-tech- 
nical knowledge which sum up the experiences and 
aspirations of mankind and which underlie all ap- 
plied knowledge, we rarely find a really satis- 
factory offering. 

Our steps in the movement for adult education 
have been limited almost uniformly to those which 
will pay. Even within the university organization 
itself, this is true. Extension activities, so far as 
I know, have never been permitted to draw directly 
upon the great endowments with which so many 

17 


EDUCATION FOR ADULTS AND OTHER ESSAYS 


of our great institutions have been blessed. In our 
largest university, the Treasurer’s Report for 1924 
shows receipts for extension classes of almost a 
million dollars, and expenditures which do not ex- 
ceed $650,000. In the stronger state-supported 
universities, the plan of expenditure contemplates 
a contribution of five dollars from the student for 
every seven dollars spent, a much higher ratio than 
that which the State asks in the case of a regular 
student. In the smaller state institutions, the 
policy is to make the extension work wholly self- 
supporting. All along the line, the development 
of adult education has been controlled by this 
economic factor, and I think I am justified in say- 
ing that, in the great majority of cases, the enter- 
prise is frankly commercial in character. 

Now, what does this mean as to the general 
nature of the work which is offered? It means, as 
one would naturally expect, an overwhelming em- 
phasis on vocational courses — courses in which 
the student can see a quick return for his invest- 
ment. Among the hundred thousand students in 
Y. M.C. A. courses, for example, fully three-quar- 
ters pursue purely vocational studies — account- 
ancy, stenography, advertising, salesmanship, 
automobile mechanics, blue-print reading, and 
other technical subjects. Of the remainder, a ma- 

18 


EDUCATION FOR ADULTS 


jority are at work, not for study’s sake, but for 
credits needed for matriculation into professional 
schools of law, or dentistry, or pharmacy. The 
residue, which gives up its leisure in response to an 
impulse to acquire knowledge for its own sake, is 
inconsiderable, if not negligible. Between Y. M. 
C. A. and Y. W. C. A. studies there is a difference 
only in degree. The somewhat larger proportion 
of Y. W.C. A. students who pursue non-vocational 
studies may be explained by the greater cultural 
interest of the feminine half of the population in 
all strata of American life. We have already seen 
that the university extension student is typically 
a teacher, and it is fair to assume that the fact that 
academic credits may be obtained towards degrees 
or certificates, which, in turn, lead to elevation in 
the educational hierarchy, is a more potent influ- 
ence than what we used to call the pursuit of 
learning. In the correspondence classes, ninety- 
five in every hundred are studying radio teleg- 
raphy, engineering, shop mechanics, bookkeeping, 
or some other subject equally specialized, in the 
interest of a better job and more money. 

I hope I shan’t be misunderstood. I believe in 
vocational education, and believe our country 
needs more and better opportunities than it is now 
enjoying. But, important as it is, it is only a 

19 


EDUCATION FOR ADULTS AND OTHER ESSAYS 


part of our whoie educational program and 
its rapid development has overshadowed and 
has even tended to stifle the educational op- 
portunities which prepare one for living rather 
than for gaining a livelihood. If our friendly 
critics from other lands and other types of civiliza- 
tion are right (and whether they are right or 
wrong, they are at any rate unanimous), we as a 
people are very much better hands at earning a 
living than we are at living— assuming that 
privilege to be more or less fully earned. 

Perhaps I should point out at this place one 
apparent exception to the overwhelming predomi- 
nance of the vocational in adult education. To 
describe it, I shall have to coin a phrase. Let me 
call it “ pointed education.” Teaching of this type 
hasn’t to do with earning a living, nor need it be 
self-supporting. Offhand, one might be tempted 
to regard it as liberal education. But in all its 
multifarious manifestations, pointed education al- 
ways presents this characteristic. In every case, 
somebody is willing to pay in order that other 
people may think as he does. These projects are 
at bottom really missionary rather than educa- 
tional. We may accept the sincerity of those who 
support enterprises of this character, as we find 
them in the field of social hygiene, for example, 

20 


EDUCATION FOR ADULTS 


or in “ Americanization ” and citizenship, or work- 
ers’ education. We may admit the good quality of 
much of the work of this type, but because of its 
limitation, none of these activities touches the real 
nub of the question we are now discussing. As 
Heywood Broun has said in one of his lay ser- 
mons, “ Education is nothing if it gives a man any- 
thing less than an opportunity to choose for him- 
self the things which he will believe.” If pointed 
education were real education, we could learn more 
from Soviet Russia just now than from any other 
country, for Moscow is conducting a nation-wide 
campaign in the teaching of adults. 

This doesn’t mean that adult education should 
avoid subjects on which people disagree. I cannot 
quote from any representative American docu- 
ment in this matter, because we have not as 
yet nationally recognized the importance of edu- 
cation for adults. We have before us, however, 
the report of an Adult Education Committee 
which the British government thought it worth 
while to set up in the dark days of 1916, and in 
this report we find the following significant sen- 
tences: “ In the realm of adult education, contro- 
versial studies cannot be ruled out, for their 
exclusion would cut the heart out of the social 
impulse which has been so largely responsible for 

21 


EDUCATION FOR ADULTS AND OTHER ESSAYS 


the growing demand for adult education... 

The basis of discrimination between education and 
propaganda is not the particular opinions held by 
the teachers or the students, but the intellectual 
competence and quality of the former and the 
seriousness and continuity of study of the latter.” 

What nationally we lack the most, as I see it, is 
the habit — and in most communities the oppor- 
tunity as well — of consecutive study in some sub- 
ject for its own sake — history, literature, science, 
the fine arts, what you will — not to fill the pay en- 
velope, directly or indirectly, but to develop in the 
student what experience has proved to be one of 
the most durable satisfactions of human life. The 
study must be consecutive, for the scattered lec- 
tures upon this and upon that, on which we have 
been relying since the days of the old lyceum, 
stimulating as they may be for the moment, leave 
no permanent impression. They don’t really 
educate. 

This overwhelming emphasis on the vocational 
in our adult education isn’t inevitable. In Eng- 
land and in Denmark, for example, the two coun- 
tries which have most to teach us, the most in- 
teresting work is being done in the non-vocational 
field. In England any group of men or women 
willing to give up one evening a week for three 

22 


EDUCATION FOR ADULTS 


years and to pay a very small fee from their own 
pockets, can, through the good offices of the Work- 
ers’ Education Association, obtain first, a grant in 
aid from the British government, second, a supply 
of books from the Carnegie United Kingdom 
Trust, third, a competent teacher from Oxford or 
Cambridge or one of the municipal universities. 
These English classes are significant chiefly as a 
demonstration of what can be done. ‘The total 
numbers involved are not very great, some 30,000 
in all. We have before us, however, in the little 
kingdom of Denmark, an example of how a system 
of non-vocational adult education can literally 
change the spirit of a whole nation. After the war 
of 1864 and the loss of Schleswig and Holstein, 
Danish morale was at a dangerously low ebb. 
Within two or three generations, however, the 
national spirit has literally been made over, partly 
through the adoption of the principle of co-opera- 
tion in agriculture and marketing, but primarily 
through a system of folk schools which the people 
themselves built up. It is estimated that to-day 
almost one-third of the young people of the agri- 
cultural population are voluntarily attending these 
schools. The courses are short — five months in 
winter for the boys, and three in summer for the 
girls; they are strictly non-vocational in character 
23 


EDUCATION FOR ADULTS AND OTHER ESSAYS 


— Denmark provides other schools, also well-at- 
tended, in agriculture and other vocations. These 
folk schools are run on the simplest lines, and the 
whole investment involves a cost too small for us 
spendthrift Americans even to imagine. 

It is very unlikely that any system — English, 
Danish, or any other — can be transported bodily 
to meet our needs here. It seems much more prob- 
able that our main line of development in cultural 
education for adults will be to broaden our exist- 
ing programs in the vocational field. We need, 
however, to undertake as promptly as possible a 
sympathetic study of the efforts in non-vocational 
education now scattered and unrelated, which 
have sprung up all over the country. One of the 
investigators of the Carnegie Corporation reported 
that by all odds the most effective teaching of 
adults which he saw anywhere was in a class of 
working girls conducted last summer at Bryn 
Mawr. I believe that from such an examination 
might be drawn lessons of nation-wide importance. 
The very number and variety of these projects, 
and the fact that they have most of them grown 
up spontaneously, is a most encouraging sign of 
the time. 

Some of these, like the Williamstown Confer- 
ence, are well known but are not usually thought 

24 


EDUCATION FOR ADULTS 


of as agencies for adult education. Others are al- 
most unknown —a mountain school here and 
there in the South, an adaptation of the Danish 
folk school in Pennsylvania, a workers’ group in 
Arkansas, a course for foremen in an industrial 
town, a study group of executives in a great cor- 
poration, and the reading and discussion groups, 
such as Amherst recently set out to develop among 
her alumni. Perhaps the best work in project 
education to-day is being done with the enlisted 
men in the army. 

I venture to predict that in much we are now 
doing, we shall have to turn back from our present 
practices and start afresh. When, for example, we 
look at the actual technique of teaching cultural 
subjects to adults, we find a beautiful example of 
the lack of proper contact between our educational 
leadership and our adult education. Of course, 
one can point to many examples of excellent teach- 
ing, but they are not typical, and, in most cases, 
they are accidental. The usual process is to cut 
off cold slices of university courses, add water and 
perhaps a little sugar, and serve. 

And yet the whole field is extraordinarily in- 
teresting and stimulating from the teacher’s point 
of view. The students are going forward on their 
own steam instead of being gently impelled by 

25 


EpUCATION FOR ADULTS AND OTHER ESSAYS 


parental or social pressure along the well-oiled 
grooves of ‘regular’ education. Perhaps the sit- 
uation which a teacher of a class of working-men 
must face can best be described by including a 
paragraph or two from a staff report which has 
recently come under my eye: 

Working-men must first be interested and only 
then instructed. Economic law and historic fact 
must be made palatable without tampering with 
ingredients. A new type of teacher and a new 
idiom must be worked out, for adults cannot be 
taught as adolescents are. They have already done 
a day’s work. They come with some experience in 
life. They require a body of material closely re- 
lated to their immediate problems, whether per- 
sonal or occupational. No class is academically 
homogeneous. The best work is now being done 
by college teachers, men liberal by belief, some- 
what rebellious against the tediousness of teaching 
uninterested college youths, and appreciative that 
they can learn as much by contact with men who 
come with experience, as the men can learn from 
them. 

While Gown has slumbered and slept so far as 
cultural education for adults is concerned, other 
agencies have been more alert. As has already 
been pointed out, in the large cities, the museums 

26 


EDUCATION FOR ADULTS 


of art and science have developed educational ac- 
tivities of great interest. Perhaps most signifi- 
cant of all, the American public library, the coun- 
try over, has made for itself a place in education 
which is unique in the history of the world. But 
the reading and study programs of the libraries, 
useful as they are, necessarily miss one great ele- 
ment in any scheme of education, and that is the 
element of discussion. Some way must be found 
to fit the library’s contribution into the other parts 
of the educational offering. 

Another matter to which our wise men must. 
address themselves is to find some way whereby 
the extra-mural student who has demonstrated 
outstanding ability may, if he desires, be trans- 
ferred to the university or to whatever environ- 
ment may be the best for his fullest development, 
with no questions asked as to fees or entrance 
credits or certificates. JI am not referring to the 
student who is merely competent or merely in- 
dustrious, but to the man or woman who has 
shown the possibility of becoming distinguished. 
In any environment or under any conditions, 
there are only a few who can be recognized 
as of really superior quality, but these few 
should be discovered and given the keys of the 
city. 

27 


EDUCATION FOR ADULTS AND OTHER ESSAYS 


Perhaps the present generation does not know 
why the college and university of to-day seem so 
timid about taking a chance with the candidate 
who does not wear the formal wedding garment of 
154 duly authenticated entrance units, or what- 
ever the total at the moment may be. It is be- 
cause in the late “nineties and early nineteen hun- 
dreds, a husky young coal-heaver or longshoreman 
who had announced an earnest purpose to over- 
come the deficiencies of early education, could 
easily obtain admission as a special student at the 
rival college or university (never at one’s own) — 
such aspirant appearing a week or so later in the 
line of the enemy football team. In the attempt 
to check these athletic abuses and to conform to 
the requirements of various standardizing agen- 
cies, the special student, who has or ought to have 
a very real place in our scheme of things, has prac- 
tically disappeared. 

There is no reason why the colleges, in their own 
interest, should not become much more generous 
than they now are, particularly with the present 
available tests of natural aptitude and the greater 
personal attention now given to questions of ad- 
mission and supervision. From the point of view 
of adult education as a whole, such freedom, even 
though it might be exercised in only a few cases, 

28 


EDUCATION FOR ADULTS 


would, I am sure, have an extraordinarily stimulat- 
ing effect. 

This question of tests of aptitude brings me to 
another point. So far as I know, the whole move- 
ment, both vocational and non-vocational, is going 
forward without the benefit of what we are just 
beginning to understand about educational meas- 
urements of capacity and accomplishment, al- 
though these measurements, particularly those of 
capacity, are obviously more important in extra- 
mural education than within the four walls of the 
college class. | 

Not so long ago, when numbers were small, the 
question whether a given student was capable of 
profiting fully by such extra-mural courses as he 
might desire to take was relatively unimportant 
except to himself; and, as a matter of fact, he was 
pretty sure to profit, because, without his knowing 
it, he was the product of a process of selection. 
Even if he were not intellectually gifted, he had at 
least shown courage and initiative enough to swim 
against the current. 

To-day, however, the whole picture has changed. 
Students in adult education of various kinds have 
increased in number, not arithmetically but geo- 
metrically. The element of imitativeness, of 
which we all know the power, is in full operation. 

29 


EDUCATION FOR ADULTS AND OTHER ESSAYS 


Young people are now subject to a terrific “ sell- 
ing” pressure. There are at least five thousand 
highly paid and highly skilled correspondence- 
school salesmen at work all the time. One can 
hardly open a magazine without being faced either 
by an inspirational article in the reading matter or 
by an illustrated advertisement showing, for ex- 
ample, a young man who has taken somebody’s 
correspondence course and is therefore sitting at 
the president’s desk, from which he looks down 
with proud pity upon the shabby and cringing 
contemporary who failed to profit by his corre- 
spondence opportunities. In a word, we can no 
longer assume that men and women will enter 
adult education as a result of superior energy and 
power of deliberate decision any more than we can 
assume the students in our colleges to be impelled 
by the motive of intellectual interest. It is re- 
ported that nineteen out of twenty of the regis- 
trants in correspondence courses drop out before 
the completion of the course, and the mortality in 
all forms of extra-mural education is far higher 
than in regular courses, though the latter is high 
enough, in all conscience. Under the conditions 
necessarily controlling adult education, we must 
expect in any case a relatively high mortality, but 
is there anything we can do to keep it within 
30 


EDUCATION FOR ADULTS 


bounds? For one thing, a way must be found to 
enable students to distinguish between bona fide 
correspondence schools and those which are simply 
swindles. It is a fact that anyone “ who has pub- 
lished an article ” can become a candidate for the 
Ph.D. degree in an institution legally empowered 
to grant that degree, the institution offering more 
than eight hundred courses, conducted by a faculty 
consisting of a man and his wife, both of them 
government clerks, aided by their only child. 

The most important way, however, to prevent 
the present wastage is to provide an adequate sift- 
ing device. It may be too much to expect institu- 
tions run on strict business principles, as practi- 
cally all of them are, to turn away customers by a 
rigid system of admission requirements, but why 
should not the student himself take the initiative? 
Why should he not arrange for his own entrance 
test? He would do so, Iam sure, if he realized just 
how much of an investment of money, time, and 
energy a serious course involves, and if he under- 
stood the almost uncanny accuracy of the prog- 
nosis provided by the best types of educational 
measurements. The machinery for tests of this 
character already exists. Some forty thousand 
college students are tested annually, and with very 
slight modifications, the questions could be made 

31 


EDUCATION FOR ADULTS AND OTHER ESSAYS 


available for the adult-education student. The 
suggestion may prove a little shocking to our pres- 
ent conventions, but, after all, there should be no 
more hesitation about being tested for one’s capac- 
ity to profit by a course of instruction organized 
for a given level of maturity (and that is all the 
so-called intelligence test really amounts to) than 
about having one’s eyes examined by an oculist. 
A test, or rather a series of them, is particularly 
important in the case of those who have left school 
early for any reason other than actual financial 
necessity. Human nature isn’t so stupid, after all; 
and if a healthy boy or girl finds school work a 
bore, it means, in most cases, simply that the par- 
ticular type of artificial experience which we call 
class instruction is not likely to be profitable for 
that particular person. A suitable test might 
bring out real capacity for learning certain manual 
skills in the case of a person for whom further book 
learning would be a waste of time. 

Perhaps some of my readers have been thinking 
that this is all a highly theoretical and probably 
impracticable discussion, one which we call, and 
which we debase the word by calling, an “aca- 
demic” discussion. Don’t things of this kind work 
themselves out, on the whole, pretty well? If 
these hypothetical questioners are right, and if we 

32 


EpUCATION FOR ADULTS 


can afford to let things work themselves out, it will 
simplify things tremendously. We can, for ex- 
ample, placidly watch the rapid increase in the 
hours of leisure for manual workers, coupled as 
this increase usually is with a decrease in the 
variety and interest of the work itself, and have no 
concern with making increased provision for the 
profitable improvement of these added hours in 
which the individual is free to choose what he shall 
do. Mechanical appliances and prepared foods, it 
may be said in passing, are rapidly creating the 
same leisure-time problem for the housewife. We | 
need not agree with George W. Alger that “a 
civilization that bores its beneficiaries is perhaps 
even worse than one which overworks its slaves.” 
When we read that in New York City alone there 
are each year at least twice as many homicides as 
in England and Wales, we can ignore the implica- 
tion of the immensity of the group of the unad- 
justed and unhappy from which the participants 
in our appalling crime record must be drawn. We 
are free to assume that it does no particular harm 
for millions of well-meaning people to be stam- 
peded in this wild direction or in that, all for the 
lack of any knowledge or conception of truths they 
might readily have learned from man’s previous 
experience. We need have no concern over the 
33 


EDUCATION FOR ADULTS AND OTHER ESSAYS 


general state of mental and cultural activity in our 
community, with our proportion of Babbitts and, 
by the same token, with the proportion of gifted 
men who go through life handicapped by the cru- 
dities and limitations of an Arrowsmith. If there 
1s no connection between these matters and adult 
education, the discussion 7s theoretical. It is, in 
the bad sense of the word, “ academic.” If, on the 
other hand, we are not satisfied with things as they 
are, and if we are not fatalists, it is, I submit, well 
worth while to turn our attention to adult educa- 
tion, not as a means of bringing about the millen- 
nium, but as an agency of very definite impor- 
tance in making life better worth living for the 
American citizen. 


34 


ADULT EDUCATION, TODAY AND 
TOMORROW * 


Ir THIS were the year of Grace, 1923, or even 
1924, and if one of you had wanted to know how 
many men and women in the United States were 
supplementing their major job in life, whatever 
that might be — profession, business, trade, home- 
making — by using their minds seriously and con-. 
secutively (I don’t mean an occasional lecture or 
an occasional solid book) ; if you had asked this, I 
could not have made the wildest guess. Today I 
can tell you that there must be well over three 
million. If the question had been as to what and 
where and how these people were carrying on their 
studies, I should have been equally at sea, for at 
that time neither I nor anyone else knew the 
answer. No one knows it fully today, but at 
least a good start has been made in getting at the 
facts. 

I am not going to take your time now to go into 
the details of the many different types of adult 


1 Recognition Day, Chautauqua Institution, August 18, 
1926, Chautauqua, N. Y. 


35 


EDUCATION FOR ADULTS AND OTHER ESSAYS 


education, for these are available in print, or soon 
will be. I shall try rather to consider the problems 
that are common to all these types; to tell what is 
being done to solve some of these, and to outline 
what, in my opinion, still remains to be done be- 
fore adult education in America can be said to be 
on a sound basis. . 
We are beginning to realize all along the line 
that education as a secondary activity has very 
different qualities from education as a primary 
activity. There is the element of fatigue to con- 
sider for example, the unevenness of preparation; 
on the other hand, there is usually a background of 
practical experience that is lacking in the case of 
the so-called regular student, who as a matter of 
fact may really be very far from regular, but that 
is beside our present point. The teacher of adults 
can also count on the fact that his pupil is study- 
ing of his own volition, presumably at some sacri- 
fice of time and energy, and is not acting merely 
under external compulsion, parental or social. 
We are beginning to appreciate the problems in- 
volved in the technique of instructing such people; 
the need of specially trained and perhaps specially 
minded teachers, and of new teaching material for 
them, and the need also of special facilities to per- 
mit those who so wish to work without a teacher. 
36 


ApuLtT EpucatTion, Topay AND TomMoRROW 


Two years ago, if a foreigner of inquiring mind 
had come to our shores in search of information and 
suggestions about the education of adults, a Dane, 
for example, for in Denmark, adult education is 
taken very seriously indeed, he would have had to 
pick up such information as he might here and 
there, and more or less at random. Today he 
would find an American National Association for 
Adult Education, both ready and able to help him, 
and he would find as its President a man with an 
almost uncanny instinct for concerning himself 
with the education of tomorrow rather than that. 
of yesterday, or even of today. It is a good au- 
gury for adult education that Dean Russell of 
Teachers College has been willing to take this re- 
sponsibility of leadership. The Board of Directors 
includes leaders in the Chautauqua and forum 
movements, of the public educational systems, of 
university extension, of the libraries, of labor 
classes, mountain schools, and shop schools. 

Now this Association stands ready to do more 
than to satisfy the curiosity of the individual, be he 
foreigner or citizen. It will gather together and 
distribute accurate information to its members, 
both as to American and Foreign developments. 
It will make itself responsible for advice regarding 
needed researches and demonstrations. 

3f 


EDUCATION FOR ADULTS AND OTHER ESSAYS 


I think however its greatest usefulness will prove 
to be as a source of advice to communities as to 
how they may organize and co-ordinate what they 
already have, and how, if necessary, they may sup- 
plement it in order that the citizen of that com- 
munity may have available a well-balanced edu- 
cational ration. 

We have gone far enough to realize that it is the 
community which is the real unit with which we 
have to deal, and not the type of study in which 
the individual may be interested. Instead of dis- 
cussion as to the abstract merits of vocational 
studies vs. cultural, and expressions of distress that 
we haven’t more of the latter, what we really need 
are some good local demonstrations of this bal- 
anced ration, and how the inhabitants thrive on it. 

Let me give another reason for the importance 
of this community integration. The element of 
discussion 1s where thus far we have fallen short 
most conspicuously. Our students are lectured to, 
or more likely, they read to themselves and write 
to their teachers. Without some local co-ordina- 
tion, therefore, some planning and leadership, the 
individual students can’t possibly get the play of 
mind upon mind which has proved to be the 
crowning merit of the English workers’ education 
classes. 

38 


ApuLT EpucaTIon, TopAy AND ToMORROW 


Not only has this new American Association 
come into being within the past few months, but 
there is evidence on every hand of a new recog- 
nition of the importance of adult education. The 
American Library Association has a vigorous de- 
partment. The Bureau of Education at Washing- 
ton has now a regularly appointed Specialist in 
Adult Education. An informal group of repre- 
sentatives of a few of the stronger proprietary cor- 
respondence schools has been formed, known as 
the Home Study Conference, in the interest of 
higher educational standards. This seems to be of - 
particular significance, because it is these corre- 
spondence schools, much more than the older edu- 
cational agencies, which have demonstrated what 
we may call the adult education market in this 
country, by which I mean the hundreds of thou- 
sands of people who are willing to invest in the 
cause of further education, not only their leisure 
time and their energy but a very substantial share 
of their money. The latest figures available show 
that these schools collect at least $75,000,000 an- 
nually in fees. 

Not only will these agencies be in a position to 
gather and distribute information to those spe- 
cially interested, but the general public will not be 
overlooked. This fall the Macmillan Company 

39 


EpUCATION FOR ADULTS AND OTHER ESSAYS 


will inaugurate a series of volumes on adult educa- 
tion by publishing the results of some of the 
studies which have been made under the initiative 
of the Carnegie Corporation. These will include 
“The Young Worker ” by Owen Evans, “ Univer- 
sity Extension” by Hall-Quest, “‘ The Correspond- 
ence School and the Lyceum” by Noffsinger, 
“New Schools for Older Students’ by Nathaniel 
Peffer, and “ The Library and Adult Education” 
by a commission of the American Library Associ- 
ation. 

Dorothy Canfield is at work on a series of articles 
for McCall’s Magazine, which will later be pub- 
lished in book form by Harcourt, Brace and Com- 
pany. 

Today the implications that education is essen- 
tially a continuing process and that after maturity 
it needn’t be haphazard are to be found on every 
hand. It is being realized that ways must be found 
to “combine the new knowledge with the new 
leisure.” 

I was much interested recently in coming upon 
a definition of education by John Dewey, “ the 
enterprise of supplying the conditions which in- 
sure growth, or adequacy of life, rrespective of 
age.” I was interested also in noting that when 
the farm women were asked not long ago what 

40 


Aputt Epucation, Topay AND ToMoRROW 


they wanted out of life to make them happy, they 
placed opportunity for further education high on 
their list. A very practical man, though a far- 
seeing one, — for there is no necessary contradic- 
tion, — is Owen D. Young, and I give great weight 
to his statement, made not long ago, that American 
industry must for the future be based not on a 
living wage alone, nor on a saving wage, but on a 
cultural wage. 

Another significant thing is the way in which the 
educational aspects of great national movements 
are becoming more clearly recognized. Success in 
public health and other social work doesn’t depend 
on telling people how to live and what to do or to 
leave undone, but on teaching them — and there’s 
a deal of difference between telling and teaching. 
Politics is recognizing the same thing and so is 
organized business. In none of these fields have 
we fully succeeded in making the distinction be- 
tween education and propaganda, but that will 
come with time. The co-operation of parent and 
teacher in the interest of young children is also 
turning out to be a process of educating the parent, 
even the father. 

Not only the libraries, as we have seen, but the 
museums are beginning to recognize that their job 
is essentially an educational one. John Cotton 

41 


EDUCATION FOR ADULTS AND OTHER ESSAYS 


Dana, who is one of the major prophets of this gen- 
eration, is conducting a museum in the city of 
Newark, which shows how far the new conception 
has gone and which will repay the study of anyone 
interested in this field. 

By the way, don’t let me leave the impression 
that I think all that is new in adult education is 
good nor that all that is good is new. Chautauqua 
for example is not new — as conscious adult edu- 
cation goes in America, it 1s very old —and yet 
you are here to say that it is good, and I am here 
to agree with you. 

Adult education, old and new, is very much in 
the air today. There is a great deal of it going on 
and very many people are affected, but don’t think 
that it is all over but the shouting. Quite the con- 
trary, there is some danger that the shouting is 
taking place in advance of any real justification for 
it. The situation as I see it is this. ‘We have the 
best opportunities in the world’s history for fur- 
thering the education of adults, abundance of lei- 
sure time, an economic leeway, the like of which 
has never been seen, a very high degree of literacy 
and a national belief in education and what it can 
do, which is almost naive in its trustfulness., We 
have furthermore in the specific business of con- 
ducting adult education a very vigorous going 

42 


ApuLt Epucation, Topay AND ToMORROW 


concern, or rather a number of very different and 
largely unrelated going concerns, dealing in the 
ageregate with a very large and rapidly growing 
number of individuals. 

Outstanding examples of these are to be found in 
the extension services of state universities, — Wis- 
consin, for example, or California, — the rapidly 
growing interest of endowed universities like Co- 
lumbia, in the public night schools in the more 
progressive cities, in the best of the correspondence 
schools, in the class work of national organizations 
like the Y. W. C. A.; of libraries like Cleveland - 
and Indianapolis; of labor groups in Milwaukee 
and Cincinnati; of museums like the one in New- 
ark already mentioned, and the great institutions 
of New York and Chicago. Immense educational 
enterprises are carried on by the United States 
government, notably in its two newest depart- 
ments, Agriculture and Commerce. We have also 
scattered through the country a number of local 
experiments, all of them modest, but some of them 
of significance as destined to point the way for 
future progress. 

All this is to the good, but it isn’t enough. In- 
stead of glowing with pride that so many do find 
ways to go on with their education, we should 
blush to think that so many fail to do so. I could 

43 


EDUCATION FOR ADULTS AND OTHER Essays 


give you a long catalogue of things that need to be 
done before our adult education is really on a 
sound basis, but they are all or very nearly all 
manifestations, more or less direct, of lack of ad- 
justment between this type of education and edu- 
cation in general, a lack of appreciation that it 
isn’t something separate but is an essential part of 
a larger whole. 

I have a friend, a railway official, who recently 
set out to give me some adult education. Among 
other things he informed me that when the Twen- 
tieth Century is running at her normal speed and 
on a level track, the strain on the tie-bars is only 
twenty pounds, also that on the average it costs 
about fifty dollars to stop atrain. In telling me this 
my friend unwittingly furnished me with a text for 
my sermon today. What he really means of course 
is not that it cost fifty dollars to stop the train, but 
to start it up again. Now atrain isn’t the only thing 
that costs something to start up, if once you have 
let it stop. When we describe adult education as it 
is conducted today we are in effect talking about 
this expensive process of starting up a train which 
has been permitted to stop. Why need it have 
stopped? People don’t cease to eat at some par- 
ticular point in their lives, with commencement 
exercises to mark the event, and then perhaps 

44 


Aputt Epucation, TopAy AND TOMORROW 


years after, have to be cajoled, besought and in- 
spired to resume the habit. It is no exaggeration 
to say that adult education in a vast majority of 
cases 1s sold today rather than bought and this I 
believe is because the appetite for learning has 
been lost. 

The continuation schools which we borrowed 
from Germany and which we started a few years 
ago with a flourish of trumpets, have in general not 
been a success, and although there are a number of 
factors which might account for this failure, the 
inability of the common schools to instill a desire - 
for more is I think the most important. 

Why should we treat the nourishment of our 
stomachs in one way and that of our minds in 
another? Some people acquire the appetite for 
feeding their minds and retain it through life, 
people who, almost literally, would starve if they 
could not get this nourishment. These are normal 
people. Why aren’t there more of them? Isn’t it 
fair to ask this question of the agencies of formal 
education? Have they given the students under 
their direction an impression of education as a 
continuing process? Have they done all that they 
could to develop a permanent appetite for it? I 
don’t hesitate to say that formal education neither 
recognizes the importance of this element of con- 

45 


EDUCATION FOR ADULTS AND OTHER ESSAYS 


tinuity nor is doing what it might to prepare the 
minds of students to carry it out in their own lives. 

Of course good teaching stimulates curiosity 
and the person who retains his curiosity comes to 
recognize what John Erskine calls the moral obli- 
gation to be intelligent. Teaching of this kind, 
however, is all too rare in any branch of learning, 
and all too often the student drops any particular 
course of study with a sense of profound relief. 
There is no question in his case of getting up from 
the table hungry. 

The importance of realizing this objective does 
not lessen as successive stages in our system of 
formal education are passed. Quite the contrary, 
the farther along we go the more highly selective 
is the group with which we are dealing and the 
greater the potential usefulness to the community. 
It is particularly important that college graduates 
should not lose intellectual momentum, and yet as 
the president of a college famous in our history has 
recently pointed out, college alumni as a body 
represent about as perfect an example of arrested 
development as is to be found in our population. 
When we remember the extraordinary devotion of 
the alumnus to his alma mater, it is amazing that 
only here and there is any effort made to guide this 
loyalty and devotion along intellectual lines. 

46 


ApuLt Epucation, Topay AND ToMoRROW 


Dr. Wickenden says, “A college that gives its 
graduates a finished education is a failure. Only 
that college succeeds which equips its graduates 
for a life-time of self-education. Let us hope that 
the day is not far off when commencement will not 
mark the end of one thing and the beginning of 
another, but a mile-stone in a long, long trail that 
runs to the end of life.” 

Nor need we stop at the college. A professional 
degree should furnish no immunity from further 
study, either technical or what is possibly more 
important, cultural. 3 

Perhaps we shall have better results from the 
application of the newer educational ideas as they 
are being manifested under the Dalton Plan or in 
the Lincoln School, or the school library move- 
ment, or in the honors programs in colleges, or as 
they are just beginning to get a hearing in med- 
icine and engineering and commerce. All these 
are encouraging, for they aim at initiative on 
the part of the student rather than passive recep- 
tivity, but as yet they haven’t even touched the 
great mass. 

The inculeation of curiosity, the hunger for 
more, is the great need, but it’s a long job, for it 
will require not only a radically different attitude 
of mind on the part of most teachers, but infinite 

47 


EDUCATION FOR ADULTS AND OTHER ESSAYS 


patience, a steadfast refusal to be discouraged and 
a recognition that under the best conditions the 
score will be far from perfect. There is, however, 
a secondary need, much more practical and much 
more easy to meet. The student, when he goes to 
work, as we say, should possess not only the desire 
to carry on his education but also some definite 
information as to Just how he can do it. 

The situation as I see it may be described as 
follows: Each individual goes a certain distance, 
shorter or longer, along a series of clearly marked 
roads, kindergarten, elementary and secondary 
school, college, technical school, university. Sooner 
or later he leaves the road and strikes out for him- 
self in open country. Now in this open country 
there are paths or roads (the various agencies of 
adult education) upon which he may continue his 
journey. Some of them are in excellent repair, but 
with rare exceptions they never join the highway, 
and consequently the traveler must spend precious 
time and lose even more precious momentum in 
wandering aimlessly before he continues his jour- 
ney at the speed of which he is capable. The great 
majority never find any of these paths at all and 
such progress as they make is halting and unsatis- 
factory. 

And all this is true largely because the main 

48 


Aputt Epucation, Topay AND ToMOoRROW 


highway is lacking in sign posts, giving informa- 
tion as to the paths of continuing education. It is 
known that only a handful of those who start on 
these highways can continue very far, and for 
everyone they come to an end earlier or later. It 
is also known when the travelers leave the road in 
greatest numbers, beginning with the day when 
working papers may be taken out, then at the end 
of the junior or senior high school or junior or 
senior college course, and so on. These are the 
points where sign posts are obviously the most 
needed and where they are conspicuous by their - 
absence. 

All of which is a fanciful way of saying that edu- 
cation as a primary occupation does little or noth- 
ing to prepare the student for continuing his 
education as a secondary occupation. The studies 
which have been carried on under the direction of 
the Carnegie Corporation have made abundantly 
clear that there is almost universally a lag be- 
tween leaving school and taking up adult educa- 
tion. This lag in the case of the typical university 
extension student must be at least eight years, and 
it is equally long in the case of the correspondence 
student. For the student in night school, public 
or private, it is four or five years. 

I submit that there is no more important ob- 

49 


EDUCATION FOR ADULTS AND OTHER ESSAYS 


jective for formal education than to prepare the 
student’s mind for the need and practicability of 
continuing the process. Without this we shall 
never know what adult education might achieve 
did it not have to use so much of its energy in the 
unnecessary process of re-starting the train. 

As much as anything else we need a demonstra- 
tion of what intelligent co-operation between the 
regular teacher and the extra-mural agencies 
might accomplish. Practically all that we have 
today is the not yet satisfactory experiment of the 
continuation schools, and a study, made in Indian- 
apolis, published by the A. L. A. under the title 
“ Older Boys and Girls Out of School.” In this 
study the librarian and not the teacher took the 
initiative. An experiment ought to be tried on a 
large scale and possibly over a term of years with 
the full modern technique of personnel work and 
follow-up, educational measurement and the rest. 
I have hope that the American Association for 
Adult Education may find itself able to take up 
and carry through such a study, or rather a series 
of studies, for those leaving the grades, the high 
school, the college and the university. 

It is of great significance that the painstaking 
scientific studies which characterize the progress 
of education during the past twenty-five years are 

00 


ApULT EpucaTIon, TopAy AND ToMoRROW 


really beginning to carry over into this field. As 
one result we are about ready to say with assur- 
ance of scientific confirmation that adults are 
really able to learn at all. I mean, of course, to the 
degree that a course of study is a good investment. 
Obviously our brain as a machine changes its man- 
ner of functioning as the years pass. Children, for 
example, can learn languages practically without 
effort and much more rapidly and successfully than 
older people do at great effort. The general scien- 
tific opinion, so far as science has had any opinion 
on the subject, has been that all along the line the. 
capacity to learn new things falls very rapidly 
after the early twenties. And it is characteristic 
of the divorce between educational science and 
adult education that this seemed to worry nobody 
during the rapid growth of an enterprise which 
now costs the participants directly or indirectly 
fully $100,000,000 a year. The most recent 
studies, as I have indicated, look to a much longer 
term of fruitful learning. 

The need of a general study of the psychology of 
reading has just been pointed out by the American 
Library Association. We know a good deal about 
how children learn to read but very little about 
how or what or why adults read. And yet Mr. 
Carnegie alone contributed more than $50,000,000 

51 


EDUCATION FOR ADULTS AND OTHER ESSAYS 


toward making it possible and comfortable for 
them to do so. 

Next fall will witness the first co-ordinated ex- 
periment for the preparation of teachers of adults 
and the study of class progress. In this, for the 
first time, so far as I know, there will be applied to 
the problems and practices of adult education what 
we have learned in general education as to the 
measurements of capacity and achievement both 
of teacher and class. 

Outside of a classroom we give our adult student 
no chance to have the satisfaction of measuring by 
tests in whose reliability he himself has confidence 
what he has accomplished, in terms of what others 
have achieved. Why, for example, should not the 
A. L. A. set up a series of tests, not the old- 
fashioned examination, but the modern scientific 
product, to measure the reader’s mastery of the 
different courses in its admirable series of “‘ Read- 
ing with a Purpose” and have these given in the 
public libraries throughout the country? 

While our general need as I see it is to establish 
a more logical relation between adult education 
and formal education there are also other things 
which we need to think through. For example, 
there is the relation between adult education and 
recreation. If any of you have ever happened to 

52 


ApuLt EpucaTion, TopAy AND TOMORROW 


travel abroad with a conscientious German tourist 
you will remember the great contrast between his 
preparation for the trip and your own. Here at 
home the museums which are now being estab- 
lished in our national parks are an interesting and 
significant step toward the enrichment of the ex- 
perience of those who visit these Parks. 

Then there is the question of the Fine Arts. We 
have the best opportunities in the world to hear 
music. More important architectural monuments 
are being erected here today than perhaps in all 
other countries combined. We are rapidly becom- 
ing the custodians, public and private, of much of 
the world’s treasure in painting and sculpture. 
And yet it is only beginning to occur to us that 
one way for us as a people to get the solace and the 
delight which comes from an appreciation of 
beauty is to learn something about the different 
arts. I don’t mean strings of names and dates to 
be memorized, but something very different. 
Here is a wonderful opportunity for an adult 
education that is re-creative. The current in- 
terest in the non-commercial drama touches alike 
recreation, the arts, and adult education, and is 
one of the most encouraging signs of the times. 
The British government, by the way, has recently 
published a most interesting and informing re- 

53 


EDUCATION FOR ADULTS AND OTHER ESSAYS 


port on “The Drama and Adult Education,” 
which may be purchased from His Mayjesty’s 
Stationery Office for the sum of one shilling. 

Let me sum up in closing. We know that the 
training of adults is not a minor but a major edu- 
cational activity. We are beginning to realize on 
the one hand the extraordinary possibilities of its 
development, and on the other its special needs 
and problems. We have the organized leadership 
to meet these, both in furthering research and 
demonstration and in community integration. We 
are feeling our way toward. better co-ordination 
with other activities, notably recreation and the 
arts. Finally, and in my judgment, most impor- 
tant, we must see to it that learning is a continuing 
process not only in theory but more and more in 
fact; that we now suffer a loss of momentum that 
is as costly as it is unnecessary, and that to remedy 
this our chief job is after all to educate the edu- 
cators. 


54 


PLAYBOYS OF THE COLLEGE 
WORLD * 


To ONE who spent many years in rather close 
contact with American colleges and American un- 
dergraduates, and who has now returned to these 
contacts after a lapse of seven years, the outstand- 
ing change between that day and this is the greatly 
increased interest on the part of the students in all 
matters which have to do with the arts. Although 
the advance in collegiate music is impressive, the 
situation is even more striking with reference to 
the drama. 

The march has been so rapid that if I were to 
describe things as they were in the old days, say 
fifteen years ago, the average undergraduate of 
to-day would hardly believe it. I don’t mean that 
there was no acting; of course there was, and some 
of it very good, but the typical play was fourth- 
rate rubbish, the stage accessories and the lighting 
were of the crudest, and no one seemed to mind. 
The actors knew no better, and it made no differ- 
ence to the handful of their fellow students who 


1 An article first published in Scribner’s Magazine, January, 
1926, and reprinted by courtesy of that publication. 


59 


EDUCATION FOR ADULTS AND OTHER ESSAYS 


9) 


formed the “ house.” Altogether, dramatics was a 
very minor sport indeed. To-day, in almost every 
college, from Portland to Portland, dramatics is 
distinctly a major sport. The students have the 
highest standards as to the literary and dramatic 
value of the plays they present, and their interest 
is not confined to acting itself, but includes writing 
for the stage and the direction of performances and 
goes deeply into questions of stage setting, light- 
ing, and costuming. Indeed, it is the only under- 
graduate activity which can compete with ath- 
letics. The dramatic clubs are usually limited in 
numbers, with long waiting lists; but the student 
body at large is interested, and items of stage lore 
are taking their place with athletic dope in under- 
graduate conversation. 

Just what has happened to bring about this 
change? For the past three or four years the drama 
has been epidemic and no one can say how a new 
victim catches the fever. But if we go back to the 
comparatively recent past of, say, six years ago, we 
can nearly always trace the infection in any par- 
ticular college to some enthusiastic junior in the 
department of English, usually one who had come 
under the influence of George Baker at Harvard, 
and who either woke up a dormant dramatic so- 
ciety or, more likely, built up a new one out of his 

56 


PLAYBOYS OF THE COLLEGE WORLD 


own classes, or hers. Though the innovator’s in- 
terest was normally in plays and acting, there is an 
interesting case where an enthusiast for the estab- 
lishment of a standard English speech was the 
initiator of a strong acting tradition in a State uni- 
versity. These pioneers had to combat faculty in- 
ertia, on the one hand, and the student fear of 
being thought highbrow, on the other. But they 
had the real apostolic spirit, and they succeeded 
beyond all expectations. 

This advance in college dramatics has been in- 
tertwined with the nation-wide Little Theatre 
movement. The undergraduate movement is by 
no means a mere offshoot of the other; on the 
whole, the influence runs rather the other way, 
particularly if one includes as college work such 
professional opportunities as Professor Baker of- 
fered at Harvard and Mr. Stevens and his asso- 
ciates have given at the Carnegie Institute of 
Technology. The direction of the non-academic 
Little Theatres is largely in the hands of college 
men and women — eleven Oberlin graduates, for 
example, hold such positions —and the players 
and audiences are drawn largely from college 
alumni. 

Although the stage tradition is oldest in the 
men’s colleges and the women’s, these have been 

O7 


EDUCATION FOR ADULTS AND OTHER ESSAYS 


outstripped by the co-educational institutions, 
which we provincials on the Atlantic seaboard are 
prone to forget outnumber the separate institu- 
tions by 332 to 199, more than a third of the latter 
being Roman Catholic colleges. In other words, 
it is in the State and municipal universities and in 
the evangelical colleges which have grown up 
throughout the Middle West during the last cen- 
tury that college dramatics has taken the strongest 
hold. Most of their students come to these fresh- 
water institutions without ever having seen any- 
thing in the spoken drama better than their own 
high school play. Nevertheless, an astonishing 
number of them turn out to be excellent material. 
I am told that the first thing to be done is to eradi- 
cate almost wholly what they conceive to be act- 
ing, from their memories of the moving picture 
theatres. They all overact, because they have 
no realization of the differences between the neces- 
sities of the spoken and of the unspoken drama. 
In spite of all this, those who have taught on both 
sides of the Alleghanies say that there is a certain 
freshness and enthusiasm in the Middle Western 
youngster which more than counterbalances the 
greater sophistication of the EHasterner. In the 
rapid spread of its influence, the stage seems to 
have broken down pretty thoroughly all the bar- 
08 


PLAYBOYS OF THE COLLEGE WORLD 


riers of denominational and other restrictions. In 
the very colleges which used to avoid the immoral- 
ity of the stage by teaching Shakespeare as litera- 
ture (though they didn’t try to teach music by a 
silent reading of the score), wings have now 
sprouted from the chapel platform. Perhaps there 
has been no such partnership between the church 
and stage since the Middle Ages. 

Not so long ago, nothing was more local in its 
influence than a college play. To-day the per- 
formances at Iowa City and Berkeley, at Cornell 
and at Chapel Hill, and a score of other places, are 
news in New York. Hillsdale College, in Michi- 
gan, and Ottawa University, in Kansas, can hardly 
be included among our more prominent institu- 
tions of learning; yet what they do in the drama is 
duly recorded in the serious theatre magazines. If 
you turn over the advertising pages of The Theatre 
Arts Magazine, you can learn that Stanford and 
Iowa and Northwestern are paying cash to tell you 
about their courses in the drama. 

What do the students play? Perhaps the best 
way to answer the question is to record a few of the 
last year’s actual offerings. The Cornell Dramatic 
Club, for example, put on thirty-two plays, usually 
giving two and three performances of each, and in- 
cluding the first performance in English, of a 

59 


EDUCATION FOR ADULTS AND OTHER EsSaAyYs 


comedy by Cervantes, a medieval farce, the third 
performance, in English, of a Jacques Copeau play, 
and examples of Sudermann, Anatole France, 
Drinkwater, and, nearer home, Booth Tarkington 
and Eugene O’Neill. 

At Grinnell College, in Iowa, last year’s bill in- 
cluded, in addition to notable one-acts by Synge, 
Lady Gregory, and Lewis Beach, ‘‘ Romeo and 
Juliet,” Shaw’s “ Arms and the Man,” Rostand’s 
“Les Romanesques,” Barry’s “ You and _ I,” 
Michael Arlen’s “ Ace of Thirteens,’ Henry Arthur 
Jones’s “The Goal,” and an original All College 
Revue. 

At Iowa, a dozen long plays are staged, together 
with a number of one-act plays. Here is the list of 
the former: Flavin’s “ Children of the Moon,” 
Barrie’s ‘ Alice-Sit-by-the-Fire,” Shaw’s “ The 
Devil’s Disciple,’ Mowatt’s “ Fashion,’ Kaufman 
and Connelly’s “ Beggar on Horseback,’ Gals- 
worthy’s ‘The Silver Box,’ Shakespeare’s “ A 
Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ Jesse Lynch Wil- 
liams’s “ Why Not?” Carel Kapek’s “ R-U-R,” 
Lewis Beach’s “ The Goose Hangs High,” Euripi- 
des’ “ Iphigenia in Tauris,’ Dekker’s “ The Shoe- 
maker’s Holiday.” 

In their six years’ career, the Penn State Players 
have presented twenty-nine long plays and ninety- 

60 


PLAYBOYS OF THE COLLEGE WoRLD 


seven one-act plays; a normal school in Missouri 
has put on six different plays by Shakespeare in 
as many years. 

By increasing somewhat the list of colleges, we 
can add Sophocles to Euripides, Marlowe and 
Beaumont and Fletcher, Moliere and Lope de 
Vega, to Shakespeare. From the stage of the 
eighteenth century we can add Schiller and Sheri- 
dan, and from the modern London stage, Pinero, 
Milne, Synge, and Dunsany. From the continen- 
tal, Ibsen, Tchekov and Andreyev, Brieux, Molnar 
and Pirandello— “and a great many more of 
lesser degree, in sooth a goodly company.” I won’t- 
retail the American playwrights, but I can testify 
that the students prefer the works of men and 
women that deserve and receive success on the 
professional stage to the offerings of the “ liter- 
ary ” theatre. 

A most interesting and significant element in 
the whole movement is what has already become 
the tradition in certain institutions, namely, to en- 
courage original plays written by students and 
with local settings. These “folk plays,” as they 
are usually called, include not only one-act pieces 
but full-size dramas. The University of North 
Dakota gives plays of this character, dealing with 
pioneer life, in its open air theatre, formed by an 

61 


EDUCATION FOR ADULTS AND OTHER ESSAYS 


ox-bow in the small river that runs through Grand 
Forks. Since their professor of dramatics, Fred- 
erick Koch, migrated from North Dakota to North 
Carolina, the university at Chapel Hill has put on 
a number of plays, written and performed by stu- 
dents, and some of them of extraordinary merit, 
dealing with present-day mountain life or with 
local historical traditions. Georgia and South 
Carolina have followed their northern neighbor, 
and one of Professor Koch’s pupils has carried the 
idea to the State University of Wyoming and 
thence to Arizona, thereby adding two new cen- 
tres of local tradition, that of the Rockies and that 
of the Southwest border. The movement has been 
vital enough to impel two Chinese undergraduates 
in American colleges to write folk plays of their 
own land, and one of these has been deemed 
worthy of publication in full in “The Golden 
Book.” Sometimes the director takes a hand and 
adapts some ancient legend for the college stage — 
Mrs. Flanagan of Grinnell has recently put on two 
pantomimes of this character, one Egyptian and 
one Hindu. 

It may be observed that the plays given by the 
college students for college audiences are as a 
whole distinctly not on what an Englishman would 
call the jolly side — perhaps because, as one of the 

62 


PLAYBOYS OF THE COLLEGE WoRLD 


college directors has pointed out, undergraduates 
are happy enough to love tragedy. On the other 
hand, the comic muse has a fair share of offerings, 
and the students and their teachers don’t hesitate 
to turn from the classics to George Cohan, or to a 
home brew of what is perhaps the most character- 
istic dramatic form we have developed in America, 
our topical revue. 

Oberlin was one of the first co-educational col- 
leges to take up work in the drama, and its organ- 
ization may be taken as typical. Dramatic activ- 
ities are under the direction of one of the professors 
of English. The club is strictly limited in number ° 
to one hundred, and is divided into ten producing 
groups. A play is rehearsed by a group and is first 
performed before the club at large and criticised 
by the members. If it survives, it is given before 
the college, and finally goes farther afield — for 
the Oberlin actors, like many others, spend their 
Christmas and spring holidays on the road, their 
trips ranging from Chicago on the west to New 
York and Washington on the east. At Oberlin, as 
elsewhere, there is little or no outside help. The 
boys build the platform which enlarges the chapel 
stage. They look after the electrical work and 
plan and build the scenery, while the girls design 
and make the costumes. Asan example of student 

63 


EDUCATION FOR ADULTS AND OTHER ESSAYS 


co-operation in another college, the book and lyrics 
of a revue, in which the scenes are laid on the 
local campus, were written by the students of the 
English department; music was “ adapted” by 
students in that department; physical education 
students put on the dances, and those in art de- 
signed and painted the scenery and co-operated 
with domestic science students in providing the 
costumes. Asa result, fully a third of the student 
body took some active part in the production. 

Next to its rapid growth, I have been most 
struck by the variety of the manifestations of this 
new student interest. It can’t be pigeonholed as 
amateur, for Professor Baker’s work at Harvard 
and his work to come at Yale are professional in 
spirit, asis that at Carnegie Tech. Furthermore, a 
college actor who takes up high school teaching 
to-day will find his stage experience to be a very 
definite vocational asset, because the interest in 
dramatics in the high schools is second only to 
that in the colleges. I am told, by the way, that 
the recent bachelors of arts who have become pro- 
fessional actors or playwrights far outnumber 
those who have devoted themselves to poetry or 
painting or music or any other of the arts, with the 
possible and understandable exception of archi- 
tecture. 

64 


PLAYBOYS OF THE COLLEGE WoRLD 


In a few places, stage work counts for a pro- 
fessional degree. In many others it may be offered 
toward the bachelor’s degree, sometimes as a 
major; in still others the only reward is the fun of 
the game. Personally, I think these last are the 
most fortunate, though I fear the student wouldn’t 
agree with me; because to do the thing for the fun 
of it is of the essence of the whole movement. 

There is no blighting uniformity of eligibility 
rules. As Walter Prichard Eaton has pointed out, 
in the theatre your amateur standing isn’t deter- 
mined by whether you play summer baseball for 
money or sell golf clubs for John Wanamaker. 
The students living at International House, for 
example, who come from seventy-one countries 
and who attend forty-three different institutions 
in and about New York, have their dramatic or- 
ganization and put on their own plays. Last 
year they gave a remarkable performance of 
Drinkwater’s “ Lincoln.” 

In the men’s colleges the players are beginning 
to avoid the artificiality of masquerading the wom- 
en’s parts in serious modern plays by calling in 
faculty wives and daughters. The separate wom- 
en’s colleges haven’t yet made the corresponding 
gesture, but perhaps they will before long. The 
semi-detached ones are working upon an exchange 

65 


EDUCATION FOR ADULTS AND OTHER ESSAYS 


basis — Radcliffe with Harvard, for example. In 
the Washington Square Players, of New York 
University, and in other groups, no line is drawn 
between undergraduates and alumni. At Evan- 
ston, the local Little Theatre and the student club 
of Northwestern University are closely interre- 
lated, and there is a similar situation at Columbia, 
South Carolina. Even the faculty is welcome, a 
department head at the University of Illinois 
having recently challenged the laurels of Cyril 
Maude by his performance of Grumpy. 

After all, athletics and dramatics are branches 
of the same trunk. No human instinct is more 
deeply rooted than that for play, and this instinct, 
of which the first manifestations for young men 
and maidens was probably the dance, has from 
time immemorial tended to swing in one direction 
toward feats of physical prowess, and in another 
toward pageantry and the drama. Under the 
Puritan tradition which so deeply colored the early 
life of our colleges, physical sport did not happen 
to be specifically denounced as sin, and it came in © 
time to be tolerated and then to grow into what we 
now find. The drama, on the other hand, though 
quite as normal an outgrowth of the play instinct, 
had to await a breakdown of the intolerances of 
the Puritan tradition. I don’t mean that the 

66 


PLAYBOYS OF THE COLLEGE WORLD 


breakdown is complete, there is plenty of evidence 
to the contrary, but within very recent years it has 
gone sufficiently far to give the drama its chance. 

The fact that every sizable university and col- 
lege has a stadium or is planning to erect one, 
points, whether we like it or no, to that perma- 
nence which comes with vested interests. The 
corresponding investment in facilities and equip- 
ment, though negligible as compared with that for 
athletics, is large enough to provide insurance, if 
insurance be needed, against our waking up some 
morning to find that college dramatics had dis- 
appeared overnight, like Mah-Jong or the cross- 
word puzzle. I am not referring to the equipment 
for the professional study of the stage, such as that 
at the Carnegie schools, or that now being created 
at Yale, at the Chicago Art Institute, and at 
Rochester, where the Eastman School of Music 
has recently added dramatic action to its pro- 
gram. Nor have I in mind the great places of 
assembly like the Greek Theatre at Berkeley, for 
their use by the students is incidental. Iam think- 
ing, rather, of the rapidly increasing number of 
well appointed collegiate theatres, of which that 
at Dartmouth may be taken as typical of a build- 
ing constructed for the purpose, and those at the 
University of Colorado and the University of 

67 


EDUCATION FOR ADULTS AND OTHER ESSAYS 


North Carolina as adaptations of older buildings. 
A new theatre is being erected at Brown for the 
Komians, and on the campus at Iowa the State is 
erecting a laboratory theatre admirably equipped, 
with an auditorium for six hundred people. In 
addition, the colleges are rapidly accumulating 
valuable collections of sets and other equipment, 
most of it home-made. That at Oberlin, for ex- 
ample, is valued at $10,000. 

If, however, the development of dramatics has 
followed that of her elder sister in certain ways, it 
has broken sharply away in others. Thus far she 
has escaped the rigidity and conformity, I almost 
said the old-maidishness, of her senior. May she 
ever be free from it! In athletics, the country 
over, every one must do the same thing at the same 
time under the same rules, often without rhyme or 
reason. I have seen, for example, the University 
of Virginia playing football when it was too hot for 
the men to wear stockings. The college theatre, on 
the other hand, embraces all types — professional, 
vocational, with or without faculty or outsiders. 
The Californians take advantage of their climate 
and give outdoor pageants. The success of the folk 
plays depends, obviously, on devotion to the genius 
loci. 

Even more striking is the difference in attitude 

68 


PLAYBOYS OF THE COLLEGE WoRLD 


toward the world outside the college walls. In 
athletics, this world is counted on to fill the sta- 
dium and its youth to provide husky freshmen, 
and that is about all. The occasions are very rare 
where such interest as a college may take in the 
development of school or community sport cannot 
clearly be recognized as a recruiting move. Noth- 
ing could be more different than the situation in 
the drama. The students really want to help the 
work in the schools and to co-operate with that in 
the communities. They lend them props and 
other equipment with the greatest generosity. 
They give performances where there is not the 
slightest chance of meeting expenses. They don’t 
hesitate to act in one-room schoolhouses lit by 
gasoline lamps. Here again, as might be expected, 
the missionary spirit is particularly strong in the 
institutions which emphasize the student folk 
play. The Carolina Playmakers, for example, 
show their plays in three States, having given per- 
formances last year in twenty-nine different school- 
houses and town halls. The hill towns have no 
theatres, but they furnish the most critical audi- 
ence possible for this folk drama. 

The partial rising of the cloud of intolerance and 
the nation-wide revival of interest which the 
drama shares with all the arts, plus the influence 

69 


EDUCATION FoR ADULTS AND OTHER EssAys 


of a few inspiring leaders— these are enough to 
explain the new impulse in college dramatics. But 
are they enough to account for the extraordinary 
hit which the drama has made? May there have 
developed inside the life of the present-day college 
some elements which make its advent peculiarly 
welcome? I have consulted several of the play 
directors and teachers of the drama about this, but 
they weren’t greatly interested. Being enthusi- 
asts, they see no reason to seek for other causes 
than the virtues of the drama itself. I may, how- 
ever, set forth four suggestions as to possible in- 
ternal influences — confessing that I think most 
highly of the last two (which are my own). 

Some one has made the interesting suggestion 
that the current cult for selling one’s personality 
may have something to do with the boom in dra- 
matics. Certainly, students to-day hear a great deal 
of the value of college life as a laboratory of social 
adjustments and a preparation for the mastery of 
one’s fellow man — in a word, for “ putting things 
over ’” —far more than they hear of the benefits 
which will accrue from what we used to call a 
sound education. And they may well be forgiven 
if they place too high an emphasis on these quali- 
ties, not only for profitable business careers, but 
for the advancement of education and politics and 

70 


PLAYBOYS OF THE COLLEGE WoRLD 


religion. How far a student who comes to college 
full of these ideas of salesmanship of self, or who 
picks them up after he arrives, deliberately selects 
the college stage to give him poise, to learn to stand 
or sit without fidgeting or sprawling, to accustom 
himself to the sound of his own voice if not of his 
own words, I don’t know. I do remember an awk- 
ward and tongue-tied student of my own who told 
me later on that he had in cold blood forced his way 
into college dramatics for these reasons, and who, 
I may add, became a good actor and is now a good. 
professor. On the other hand, the coaches of to- 
day question whether this is often a conscious in- » 
fluence on the part of the students who take up 
dramatics; one of them goes so far as to say it 
never Is. 

A reader of recent fiction dealing with the life 
of American undergraduates may well wonder 
whether the theatre has profited by the absorption 
of the students in questions dealing with the emo- 
tional relations between the sexes, which is set 
forth in such detail in these novels. How far the 
student turns to the stage as dealing with matters 
which he and his friends are constantly discussing, 
either for further enlightenment or as a sort of 
safety-valve, I leave for more competent persons 
to determine. Here again the teacher of dra- 

71 


EDUCATION FOR ADULTS AND OTHER ESSAYS 


matics is inclined to regard the factor as unim- 
portant. 

The first of my own theories is that, the whole 
movement being so young, teachers and coaches 
have not had time to lose their own enthusiasms 
and become cut-and-dried; and to this extent they 
have an advantage in the unrelenting contest for 
student patronage which goes on silently behind 
the facade in our republics of arts and sciences. 
These teachers of dramatics haven’t lost faith in 
the doctrine that the normal youth really enjoys 
working with his head as well as with his legs, pro- 
vided in each case he regards the work as worth 
while. The actual mental labor which many a 
student active in dramatics must undergo to learn 
three or even four major parts a year would, if he 
were willing to apply it to their courses, perhaps 
astonish as many professors who have lost, or per- 
haps never possessed, the art of tapping these 
sources of student energy. 

Finally, I think that in more cases than either 
undergraduates or teachers recognize, the students 
who go in for dramatics are unconsciously seeking 
an escape from the trivialities of the complicated 
and highly artificial life they have built up for 
themselves. The war gave the men students a 
chance to break away from the conventionalized 

72 


PLAYBOYS OF THE COLLEGE WorRLD 


pattern, but it was a chance from which they failed 
to profit, and nowadays, when it is as much the 
thing for the girls to go to college as for the boys, 
with almost the same disregard for intellectual 
qualifications, their community life is also becom- 
ing rapidly overloaded. In the days of youth real 
living is imaginative living, and, somehow, these 
young people have succeeded in building up for 
themselves a singularly unimaginative existence. 

A part in a good play must seem much more real 
than the monotonous succession of the college 
days. Such a day for a boy begins, let us say, by 
skimming the college paper in chapel. Broken 
somewhat by two or three classes and desultory 
preparation therefor, and perhaps by some com- 
pulsory exercise, it continues with a round of 
chores for some “ activity ” or for the fraternity, 
with watching other students perform and cheer- 
ing them to order. Sometimes there will be a “ pep 
meeting” in addition. The evening’s entertain- 
ment will be a movie, a dance, or poker party. 
Even worse than the banality of the life itself is 
the interminable discussion as to its details that 
goes on during meals and at other times. 

The athletes are free while they are actually per- 
forming, and the few who are real students have 
a more permanent way of escape. But isn’t many 

73 


EDUCATION FOR ADULTS AND OTHER ESSAYS 


a boy, of the great majority who are neither var- 
sity material nor natural-born students, caught in 
this squirrel cage of trivialities, unconsciously 
bored with it all and groping for something to give 
a real fillip to existence, likely to find that for him 
“the play’s the thing” ? And isn’t many a girl, 
for somewhat different but equally cogent reasons, 
likely to feel so too? 


74 


OPPORTUNITIES AND DANGERS 
OF EDUCATIONAL 
FOUNDATIONS * 


Your committee on program must be gifted with 
prophetic vision. How otherwise could it have 
foreseen that since the time my associates and I 
were invited to contribute to this symposium, the 
right of these foundations to associate with uni- 
versities at all would have been questioned, if not 
by the president and faculty, at any rate by the 
regents of one of the universities which compose 
this association. Whatever may be said as to the 
wisdom of the action of these regents, they have 
certainly added interest and piquancy to our dis- 
cussion to-day. 

The conventional view of the relation between 
the university and the foundation is that the uni- 
versity is the active and the foundation the passive 
element, the latter furnishing the paradox of an 
immortal body perpetually engaged in selling its 
life as dearly as possible. 


1 Paper presented at the New Haven meeting of the Asso- 
ciation of American Universities, October 30, 1925. 


79 


EDUCATION FOR ADULTS AND OTHER ESSAYS 


While there is a certain element of truth in the 
conventional picture, it is significant that the pro- 
portion of foundation money which is going into 
grants for the general purposes of any college or 
university is steadily decreasing. In other words, 
foundation grants are coming more and more to be 
in support of specific projects, and the initiative 
for these projects may come from anywhere — 
from an individual, from a foundation, from a uni- 
versity or perhaps most often from one of the na- 
tional organizations of scholars. 

The foundations are largely responsible for a 
new grouping, closely related to the universities in 
personnel and program, but usually independent 
of any single institution. Research in economics, 
for example, is to-day largely in the hands of such 
institutes, as they are usually called. In science, 
the National Research Council has itself become a 
foundation through a grant from the Carnegie 
Corporation. 

Although the individual institution has there- 
fore not so much to say as to the disposal of foun- 
dation funds as it had formerly, the contributions 
of the foundation to the university, if less direct, 
are more important than ever before. I don’t 
think it an exaggeration to say that any important 
research project which has the endorsement of a 

76 


EDUCATIONAL FOUNDATIONS 


representative group of scholars can find financial 
support from one or another of the foundations. 
It is to be noted that the researches thus helped 
cover a very wide range and include such practical 
questions as the teaching of foreign languages and 
the organization of professional schools of medi- 
cine or engineering. 

Not only do all these enterprises give the ripe 
scholar the chance to show his mettle, but recent 
foundation activities are doing much to prepare 
the scholars of the generation to come. I am told 
that, in all, the foundations support nearly fifteen 
hundred fellows annually, and of course at the 
close of their incumbency the great majority either 
return to or enter academic life. 

In trying to make clear that the relations be- 
tween university and foundation are far more 
many-sided and complex than might appear off- 
hand, I don’t wish to minimize in any way the 
debt of the foundation to the university. In all 
seriousness, I don’t see how the foundation could 
carry out what I conceive to be its peculiar func- 
tions without the university. The foundation may 
be convenient, sometimes very convenient indeed 
to the university, but the latter could get along 
without it — it managed to do so for a good many 
hundred years; the foundation, on the other hand, 

i 


EDUCATION FOR ADULTS AND OTHER ESSAYS 


is absolutely dependent on the university, or, to be 
more accurate, on university men and women. 

In the first place, our executives and our expert 
staffs, when we have them, have been chiefly re- 
cruited from academic life, always from men of 
academic training and ideals. Our relations are 
with academic people, and we are constantly turn- 
ing for advice to them, sometimes offhand and 
sometimes in a more formal manner. In the edu- 
cational program of one of the foundations, for 
example, it is the practice of the trustees not to 
consider separate projects at all, but to limit their 
responsibility to the approval or disapproval of a 
year’s schedule made up of specific enterprises, 
which, by a sort of preferential ballot, have been 
selected as most promising of important results by 
a committee of academic people. Another of the 
foundations gets its light upon matters of this kind 
by conducting what in the Catholic church would 
be called a “ retreat.” To formulate one branch of 
its program twenty-three of the leaders in this 
particular field, coming from thirteen institutions, 
were willing to devote ten days of their summer 
vacation; another group had a meeting of the same 
length, in which twelve men, representing ten in- 
stitutions, did the same thing. In all three cases, 
the service of these advisers was wholly voluntary. 

78 


EDUCATIONAL FOUNDATIONS 


Most important of all, the university nearly al- 
ways provides, directly or indireetly, the personnel 
to carry any project through, and helpful as the 
financial contribution to that end may be, it is 
always secondary in importance to the human con- 
tribution. This human contribution of the uni- 
versity is not limited to academic projects, but 
affects all the activities of the foundations. The 
American Law Institute, for example, was financed 
upon the recommendation of a group of judges and 
practicing lawyers. The actual restatement of 
each branch of the law (which is the task which the 
institute has undertaken) is being done by teams 
of university law professors. For a long time there 
was no close relation between the American public 
library and the American university, but to-day 
the librarians themselves have decided that what 
their profession most needs is the establishment of 
a university school of the highest type, and they 
have turned to a foundation to make this possible. 

The university and the foundation are alike en- 
gaged in the same great enterprise, the advance- 
ment of human knowledge and understanding. 
Both work through human beings, and the job con- 
sists in choosing the right men and women, giving 
them the tools they need and then letting them 
alone. The common task is to find the individual 

79 


EDUCATION FOR ADULTS AND OTHER ESSAYS 


and to set him to work, either singly or in teams 
(and co-operative research is perhaps the most 
significant contribution of our day). 

In this task, the foundation supplements the 
university at its weakest points. It can provide 
freedom for immediate action. The fixed charges 
against its income are relatively insignificant as 
compared with those of the university, and it can 
usually put its hand on the funds needed. Apart 
from questions of money, furthermore, the smaller 
body steers more easily. 

There are times when it is everything to be able 
to strike when the iron is hot. The assurance of an 
$8,000 grant to be distributed through the Uni- 
versity of Toronto brought together three men, 
each with some special competence in dealing with 
the baffling problem of diabetes, men who other- 
wise could never have worked as a team, and these 
men developed insulin. 

The foundation, also, from the nature of its con- 
tacts, can often get a more general view of needs 
and opportunities than seems possible for any 
single university. It inevitably becomes a sort of 
clearing house of academic ideas. Saving their 
presence, academic folk are as a group rather 
ignorant than otherwise of what their neighbors 
are doing and thinking. Whatever the reason may 

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EDUCATIONAL FOUNDATIONS 


be, I believe it to be the fact that our universities 
don’t often find a way unaided to break down the 
barriers between different institutions or even be- 
tween different departments in the same institu- 
tion. University administration for one thing is 
proverbially stingy in giving professors a chance 
to move about. When men from different institu- 
tions do get together, it is usually at the expense 
of one of the foundations, and I don’t think their 
money is often used to better advantage. It is 
from such contacts that the co-operative research 
projects, which, as I said a moment ago, are char- 
acteristic of our day, usually arise. | 

The university, on the other hand, helps the 
foundation where it most needs help. “ Where 
shall wisdom be found and where is the place of 
understanding?” I refer more particularly to the 
wisdom we seek rather than to the wisdom which 
is offered to us unsolicited. It is no easy thing for 
the ear of a foundation to recognize and to under- 
stand the still small voice, with all the loud-speak- 
ers which are trained uponit. The job of a founda- 
tion executive, I may say in passing, is a hazardous 
one, particularly as regards character depreciation. 
University presidents are said to have the same 
trouble, but I doubt if they have it to the same 
degree. It can’t be good for a man to have all his 

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EDUCATION FOR ADULTS AND OTHER ESSAYS 


jokes laughed at and all his opinions, regardless 
of their validity, immediately concurred in. There 
is only one exception. The importance and prac- 
ticability of making the grant about which the 
visitor has called is not open to debate. 

So closely are the universities and foundations 
related in objectives and in the individuals or 
teams at work upon the realization of these objec- 
tives, that when the universities ask us to speak 
of our opportunities and dangers, we can reply 
that in a general way our opportunities are their 
opportunities; our dangers to a very considerable 
degree their dangers. I am, of course, using the 
term university in its broadest sense, as cover- 
ing everything contributing to the advancement 
of knowledge, whether carried forward in a degree- 
granting institution or in a school system or in a 
separate institution. 

The opportunities seem to lie rather in helping 
specific undertakings previously approved by a 
representative group of qualified persons, rather 
than in contributions to the general purposes of 
individual institutions. Alumni and other gen- 
erously minded individuals can look after the lat- 
ter, but the former fall into the category of things 
that everybody will endorse but that no one seems 
to think it is his business to pay for. 

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EpucATIONAL FOUNDATIONS 


From the nature of its organization and its con- 
tacts, often from the very fact that its activities 
are not limited to the rigidly academic, the foun- 
dation itself is sometimes the first to see aneed. In 
exceptional cases, the best opportunity for the 
foundation and the best service to the university 
les in direct and vigorous opposition to the pre- 
vailing academic point of view. An example is the 
campaign on medical education, started by a re- 
port of the Carnegie Foundation and continued for 
a decade by the General Education Board. I don’t 
mean that the opposition has lasted for ten years, 
but it is certainly true that proceedings began, in 
the words of Mrs. Malaprop, “ with a little aver- 
sion.” 

If a foundation man had selected it, I think the 
title of this symposium might well have been “ The 
Opportunities, Dangers and Dilemmas of the 
Foundation,” because in the day’s work we don’t 
have much time to think either of the first or the 
second, but we constantly have to choose as to 
which horn of the third we shall cling. The old 
questions of line vs. staff, quantity vs. quality, con- 
centration vs. diffusion, complete vs. divided re- 
sponsibility, all find characteristic ways of present- 
ing themselves in our calling. If, for example, a 
foundation maintains its own operating staff, up 

83 


EDUCATION FOR ADULTS AND OTHER Essays 


goes the overhead and in comes the danger of slip- 
ping into routine-ism. If we farm out our projects, 
we have divided responsibility, delays and misun- 
derstandings. Personally, as a democrat with a 
small d, I believe in so doing, but the actual re- 
sults are often maddening. What the founda- 
tions, like the police, call an inside job, is much 
the simplest to carry through. 

Or take the choice between a limited objective 
and a willingness to follow any promising lead. 
The former makes for continuity of policy and 
cumulative results. On the other hand, once in so 
often a long shot brings down big game. The 
Toronto grant which produced insulin is a good 
case in point. 7 

What should be the relations of the foundations 
to one another? ‘There are those who see in a 
close co-operation, if not a conspiracy in restraint 
of trade, at any rate the possibility of an undue 
concentration. If there is no co-operation, on the 
other hand, there is the danger of duplication of 
effort, of working at cross-purposes and the very 
real chance of being whipsawed by one of the 
adroit professional money-raisers, whose tribe has 
increased so rapidly in recent years. 

Then there is the choice between the advantage 
of such complete responsibility for an enterprise 

84 


EDUCATIONAL FOUNDATIONS 


as is undertaken in the making of a non-con- 
ditional grant, as against a larger total amount 
available for the purpose in question, resulting 
from a gift made conditionally upon the raising of 
a stated sum from other sources. Much can be 
said in favor of each of them. Each method has 
its advantages and its drawbacks, and one of the 
foundation groups, namely the Rockefeller, usually 
makes its grants upon a conditional basis, whereas 
the Carnegie grants are likely to be unrestricted. 

It is, I think, fortunate that there is no uniform- 
ity as to these questions of foundation policy, and 
fortunate also that there is not always consistency 
of practice, for after all the modern foundation as 
a social instrument is still in the experimental 
stage, and we need much more experience before 
venturing on anything beyond the most tentative 
body of doctrine regarding it. 

The foregoing, by the way, applies to my own 
expressions of opinion this afternoon. Perhaps I 
ought to say at this point that a few days ago I 
went over my notes with one of my Carnegie col- 
leagues; and without going into details I may as 
well confess that if the committee had happened 
to ask him here instead of me, you would have had 
a somewhat different contribution. 

Now, not forgetting what I have just said, let us 

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EDUCATION FOR ADULTS AND OTHER ESSAYS 


consider the dangers, imaginary and real. Not so 
long ago we used to hear that the grants of the 
foundations would dry up the springs of individual 
philanthropy. This has not proved to be the case. 
Indeed, I should be rather inclined to think that 
the danger, if any, is that conditional grants from 
foundations sometimes overstimulate gifts which 
individuals are not really justified in making. 

There is a real danger, as many of us believe, in 
accelerating to the point of distortion what would 
otherwise be the normal evolution of an idea or a 
project. In other words, generous foundation 
grants sometimes make things too simple. An en- 
terprise is put upon Easy Street long before it is 
for the best interest of itself or of mankind to have 
it reach that well-paved highway. Of course, it is 
all a matter of degree. We no longer believe in 
artificially hardening our children by Spartan rig- 
ors, but the danger of going too far in the other 
direction is not a fanciful one. 

‘These, however, are incidental matters, and can 
be controlled by intelligent administration. Some 
underlying questions, on the other hand, can not 
be so easily disposed of. There are those who be- 
lieve, and their numbers are not negligible, that a. 
grave danger to the community lies in the inevi- 
table growth of foundations in numbers and power 

86 


EDUCATIONAL FOUNDATIONS 


until an undue proportion of our total wealth is 
tied up in bodies which apparently have been de- 
vised with great skill to be free from control either 
by public opinion or by due process of law. Such 
disquietude is not without some historical justifi- 
cation, for in the time of Henry VIII half the 
wealth of England lay in the foundations of that 
day, which were, of course, the religious founda- 
tions; and the Reformation in England was 
concerned quite as much with getting at these 
repositories of wealth as with any theological con- 
siderations. In his report as acting president of 
the Carnegie Corporation for 1923, Dr. Henry 8. 
Pritchett has included an important historical 
study of foundations and their works and has 
shown how blind the custodians of these funds 
have often been to the public interest, and how 
often, even when they wished to do the right thing, 
they were prevented by the rigidity of their trust. 

With respect to our situation to-day, however, 
certain factors should be borne in mind. In the 
first place, in six of the eight large foundations 
which concern themselves with education, the cap- 
ital funds are not tied up in perpetuity. The 
trustees may at any time distribute not only the 
interest but the principal. Technically speaking, 
I suppose, they are not foundations at all. This 


87 


EDUCATION FOR ADULTS AND OTHER ESSAYS 


freedom was first bestowed upon a board of trus- 
tees by the charter of the Russell Sage Foundation 
in 1907. It has been extended to those in control 
of the three great Rockefeller funds — the Rocke- 
feller Foundation, the General Education Board 
and the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial — 
and also to the Milbank and Commonwealth 
Funds. If therefore the trustees of these funds 
should at any time recognize the existence of the 
danger of undue concentration, they can quickly 
meet it. 

In the second place, I, for one, believe that the 
number of very large foundations is not likely to 
be greatly increased in the future. Those which 
we now have are the fruits of an economic and 
financial situation which has already changed. 
The individuals or family groups which could, if 
they would, found hundred million dollar endow- 
ments, do not exceed ten or a dozen at the outset. 
Income taxes, death duties, perhaps changing 
standards in the business and the industrial world, 
have already operated to limit the number of huge 
fortunes, and consequently huge foundations. On 
the other hand, endowments for specific purposes, 
with relatively smaller capitalization, for example 
the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Founda- 
tion, are likely to increase rapidly in number; and 

88 


EDUCATIONAL FOUNDATIONS 


I believe we can look forward also to the growth, 
both in number and capitalization, of community 
trusts. From the diversified nature of their objec- 
tives in the case of the first type, and from ‘the geo- 
graphical limitations in the case of the second, 
these organizations do not present the same prob- 
lem as would an increase in the large endowments 
for general purposes. 

What lies behind the fear of the concentration 
of great funds in the control of a comparatively 
small number of people is of course the possibility 
that the income from funds of this size may be so 
directed as ultimately to create a nation-wide 
limitation upon the freedom of human thought 
and human action. It should be added, therefore, 
that certain men and women who feel no alarm as 
to undue concentration are nevertheless apprehen- 
sive as to the future. They fear, not a deliberate 
attempt at control, but rather an unconscious 
limitation of the field of foundation interests and 
activities through a limitation of the angle of 
vision of those in control. The trustees originally 
chosen are, they say, conservatives, and, naturally 
enough, because the fiduciary responsibility of 
these boards is an essential part of their job, and 
those competent by training to handle large sums 
of money are pretty sure to be conservatives. As 

89 


EDUCATION FOR ADULTS AND OTHER ESSAYS 


vacancies occur, they will inevitably be filled, in 
the opinion of these doubters, by others of thesame 
stripe. As to the safeguarding of the funds, this is 
all right, but as to the distribution of income, in 
other words, as to the program of the foundation, 
is it the experience of mankind that the ideas upon 
which future progress depends are welcome to 
those who are satisfied with things as they are? 
It is a fair question, and a question of which a 
good many of the members of the existing boards 
are perfectly cognizant, in spite of their conserva- 
tism. They are all looking for younger people to 
fill vacancies, and this in itself involves a shift of 
the centre of gravity toward what we call the left. 
They sometimes consciously seek a man with 
whom they know they will disagree on most points. 
A procedure which minimizes the danger of an in- 
grown board is now the accepted order in the com- 
munity trusts, and these are destined, I think, to 
take an increasingly important place in the picture 
as time goes on. These trusts divide their respon- 
sibility, the custody and investment of funds being 
in the hands of professional bankers, the distribu- 
tion of income in the hands of a separate group, 
not self-perpetuating. In the case of the New 
York Community Trust, for example, this group 
consists of eleven people, six of the eleven mem- 
90 


EDUCATIONAL FOUNDATIONS 


bers, a majority, being nominated respectively by 
the senior judge of the United States Circuit Court 
of Appeals of the Second District, by the president 
of the Chamber of Commerce of the State of New 
York, by the president of the Brooklyn Institute 
of Arts and Sciences, the mayor of the City of New 
York, the president of the Academy of Medicine 
and the president of the Association of the Bar. 
In this connection, it should be remembered that 
five of the twelve persons now composing the 
Board of the Carnegie Corporation are members 
by virtue of holding the presidencies of the Carne- 
gie Endowment for International Peace, the Foun- 
dation for the Advancement of Teaching, the Hero 
Fund Commission, the Carnegie Institute of Pitts- 
burgh and the Carnegie Institution of Washing- 
ton. In all, 115 persons share the responsibility 
for their selection. Of course, Mr. Carnegie had a 
special purpose in making this provision, but it has 
not been a bad thing for the Corporation all along 
the line of its activities. 

I hazard the prophecy that the years to come 
will find, let us call it a greater variety of light and 
shade in the makeup of the foundation boards, and 
I also venture to predict that this will make no 
particular difference in their policies and programs, 
but that it will have an important effect by in- 

91 


EDUCATION FOR ADULTS AND OTHER ESSAYS 


creasing public confidence, a point to which I shall 
return in a moment. 

In my opinion, the real danger lies, not in con- 
centration of wealth, or in conservatism or radical- 
ism, but in a misunderstanding of function. Dan- 
ger arises whenever any group with power in its 
hands, whether it be a state legislature, or the 
board of a university or of a foundation, believes 
it to be its business to use its power to direct 
opinion. Any such group is a dangerous group, 
regardless of the manner of its makeup and re- 
gardless of whether its action 1s conscious or un- 
conscious, and, if conscious, whether benign or 
sinister 1n purpose. 

Let me add that a comparison of the programs 
of the foundations say of five years ago and of to- 
day will, I think, show that the foundations them- 
selves are coming to have a progressively clearer 
understanding as to the distinction between the 
advancement of knowledge and the direction of 
opinion. 

After all, the fundamental safeguard against the 
unsocial use of these funds lies, in the long run, in 
public opinion and the possibility of public con- 
trol. The apparent immunity of those who direct 
them lies in the freedom from taxation which the 
foundations enjoy, but there is nothing irrevocable 

92 


EDUCATIONAL FOUNDATIONS 


about the present exemption of such bodies, and 
the community, if at any time it felt so disposed, 
could tax an offending foundation, or all founda- 
tions, out of active existence. The Supreme Court, 
in Veazie Bank vs. Fenno, years ago set a precedent 
for the use of the tax power for purposes other than 
revenue. The element of public confidence in the 
makeup of foundation boards is therefore of very 
practical importance. Even more important is as 
wide an understanding as possible of what the 
foundations do and how they do it. 

If I may be permitted to refer for a moment to 
the recent action at Madison: the point of im- 
portance in my judgment is not that the university 
should or should not receive financial aid from a 
foundation, but that nine citizens of a great com- 
monwealth, selected presumably because of their 
understanding of educational developments and 
educational problems, should feel that by voting 
as they did they were carrying out the trust im- 
posed upon them as regents. Is not this an evi- 
dence that wider opportunities should be given to 
the public to understand something of the actual 
steps by which the trustees of an American educa- 
tional foundation endeavor to carry out the trust 
imposed on them? It is hard to conceive that a 
fair-minded man or woman who studied the day 


93 


EDUCATION FOR ADULTS AND OTHER ESSAYS 


by day operations of any one of the important edu- 
cational foundations should fail to realize that the 
broadly co-operative character of these operations 
offers the most effective safeguard, if safeguard 
were needed, against any employment of these 
trust funds based upon unworthy motives. 

The foundations make mistakes both of omis- 
sion and of commission, and in this imperfect 
world, they will continue to doso. The real test of 
their utility lies in their record of positive ac- 
complishment. Let me give in closing just two 
examples of such accomplishment. In the first 
place, no history of American education would be 
complete without recognition of the responsibility 
of the General Education Board for the improve- 
ment of secondary education all through our 
southern states. Secondly, the story of human 
progress through the quarter century just closing 
would not be told, no matter how briefly, without 
reference to what the Rockefeller Foundation has 
done for public health throughout the world. Per- 
sonally, I think the foundations may safely rest 
their case on these two pieces of evidence. 


94 


COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS 
CoLtumBIA UNIVERSITY 


New York 


FOREIGN AGENT 
HUMPHREY MILFORD 
AMEN HOUSE, E.C. 
LONDON 














